Page 31 of Wrath of the Fae Queen
I stand abruptly, scattering butterflies and two puka. “Look, I’m going to leave. I don’t want to worsen your position here.”
Sasha bites her lip, then motions for me to sit. “The damage is already done. I’m the one who chose to help you. I just can’t seem to help myself.”
I gingerly return to the recliner. “Is there any advice you can give on how to survive this palace? I made a bargain with Titania that I would become her prisoner if I were treated as a royal guest, but with the cruelties she showed me on the road—and the threats Torin has made—I don’t know how much protection it offers.”
Sasha throws back her head and lets out an unhinged laugh. It is not the reaction I expected. My whole body tenses up.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh, but I can’t help my bitterness. By the Darkest Realm, I have been living in this nightmare for years. Decades.” Her hands flutter around her as she speaks, knocking her teacup and sloshing the hot liquid onto her saucer, but she doesn’t notice. “I am the reason you have no protection under your bargain.Iam a royal guest, and the things that tyrant has put me through allow her to do them all to you.”
She shudders, and all I want to do is rush to the couch next to her and put an arm around her shoulders, but I don’t. There is something about the woman that screams she wants distance. Maybe she no longer trusts anyone.
“Titania parades me through the streets in a caged litter with anyone else she can shame from Winter, and the people throw rotten fruit at us,” Sasha continues.
Well, that explains the last few days.
“Sometimes I am dressed like a child and chained at her feet while she holds court. Once she made me attend a ball completely naked, but I covered myself in a gown of snowflakesand she hated that. I was thrown into a cage in the throne room and starved for days as punishment, while Torin kept dumping water on my head to melt the snow, laughing. He is confident when he has his guard to back him up.”
“Gods, I am so sorry you have endured this.” I sit forward in my seat. “And she took your guards?”
A tear runs down her cheek as she wraps her arms around her middle, making herself small. “My guards, my closest friends, are in the dungeons.” Her eyes flick up to mine. “You want advice on how to survive the palace? Remember this: sometimes Titania thinks up new and creative humiliations, but mostly she forgets about me. It will be the same for you. If you want to fight her, choose the battles that matter, because she will make you pay tenfold afterward. You can be the little mouse Titania thinks you are, or you can be a Cú Sídhe in disguise. Either way, be sneaky. Be smart.”
A violent shudder runs through me. “And you cannot escape? Surely you have contacts in the Winter Court to help you return home.”
“I choose to stay,” Sasha says quickly.
“Why?”
“Did you not volunteer for this to save someone you love?” she throws back. “I agreed to be a royal hostage because I was desperately looking for someone. He needed me. When I found him, I couldn’t leave. He stillneedsme.” An expression so haunted crosses her features that I don’t dare ask.
“If I didn’t volunteer for this, Titania was going to kill Aldrin, then kidnap my mother, my sister and my newborn niece, all to hold them over my father’s head,” I offer. “She thinks she can control my entire realm with her threats and abuses, but she has no idea how wrong she is.”
“Aldrin is not dead, then,” Sasha says. “You don’t seem like a widowed mate deep in grief.”
“One day the High Chancellor’s lies will be revealed and they will come back to bite her,” I spit.
“The problem is…” Sasha selects a biscuit from a severely depleted tray, mostly consumed by puka and pixies, and takes a delicate bite. “She is often contradicted. The accusations she makes are constantly disproven, but nothing sticks to her. The people either follow her blindly, eating up her every word and ignoring the truths that stare them in the face, or they don’t care because they still think she will make them wealthy.”
“I feared as much.” I huff out a breath. “Look, Sasha, we have similar interests and the same enemy. Maybe we can work together. No one needs to know about your involvement. I need information on the High Chancellor and on weaknesses in her inner circle that I can exploit. Do you know of any senators I could approach?”
Her eyes widen and she throws up her hands, startling the pixie sitting on her shoulder, braiding a lock of her white hair. “Whatever you decide to do, don’t trust me, Keira. As much as I like you, andwantto help, you’re the rightful Queen of the Spring Court and I am an ambassador and Princess of Winter. I will betray you if my king asks it of me. In truth, the turmoil of Titania’s reign suits us. It rules Spring out as a true threat, because despite all the hate she spews, she doesn’t make a move against us, and she keeps the soldiers away from our borders because of the corruption there. I bet she is so overconfident and closed-minded that she hasn’t even bothered putting spies in my court to see what we are doing.”
I drop the teacup. The delicate porcelain shatters across the ground, spraying amber liquid and tea leaves. A deep sense of being lost at sea and surrounded by sharks overwhelms me so intensely that I don’t react straight away. I can’t even breathe as my throat tightens and my body locks up. It is like I am back inFinan’s clutches, being forced to live out horrors against my will, like marrying that lunatic.
Titania could do anything to me.
Force anything on me.
I drop to the ground and pick up the broken pieces of porcelain with shaking hands, apologizing repeatedly. Sasha is next to me, taking my hands in hers and forcing me to stop and stand with a small smile.
“Don’t worry about it,” she murmurs as her water magic swells across the ground, washing the tea down a drain in the floor. A team of pixies cleans up the broken cup.
I stare into her eyes, blue with moss-green swirls, endless wells of sadness. “For what it’s worth, I truly am sorry you are Titania’s prisoner. When I take my throne as queen, I will release you from that bond.”
Another musical laugh filled with bitterness leaves her. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m not Titania’s prisoner. I’m Aldrin’s prisoner.”
Dante drags me out of the Haven of Death and across the rocky peak of the mountain without telling me where we are going. This high up, with clouds rolling over the ground and the silvery light of perpetual dusk, it feels like we are in the sky.
The pounding of boots on stone and the chanting roars of a hundred disembodied voices reach me long before the great stone walls of a circular arena rise out of the gloom. There is a crowd waiting within and they are clearly hungry for entertainment. Calling for blood.
